Close Your Eyes
by Ellen Jacee
Summary: Draco Malfoy may have come out alive, but does that mean alright? Oneshot.


Close Your Eyes

Close your eyes. Tell me what you see.

You know you take them for granted, so just get it out in the open now.

I knew that's what you'd say. I knew that when _you_ close your eyes, you see pretty pictures in bright colors painted on the insides of your lids. You see patterns, pleasing you, lulling you into the sanctuary that is sleep, and deeper, into beautiful dreams of bright Utopias. It didn't affect you the way it did me. They say that what I've got is a chemical imbalance in my brain, but I keep telling them they're wrong. It's my entire fault. All of this. They can't blame it on some chemical imbalance; they're just trying to lie to me. They want me to take their drugs, and they want me to 'heal', but medicine to cure an imbalance that I don't have isn't going to help. It seems that only I know that.

I know what's going to happen to you, just like the way I know what you see when you shut your eyes. I know you'll grow up, marry, maybe even have kids. I know that a fifth of your life isn't much, but for you, that fifth of your life is everything that everyone will remember. I just know all of this, because that's how it's supposed to go. In this world, you were the hero. In the next one over in the line of parallel universes, maybe I'm the hero, the one who can shut his eyes and see a boundless heaven. But here, now, I'm not. Instead, I'm diagnosed with a "chemical imbalance." How silly of them.

You still don't know what I see on my eyelids. You probably don't even want to ask, for fear that my ghosts will haunt you. Fear not, O Golden One. Here and now, you are safe from their hauntings – after all, this is what you earned, through all of your tepid perseverance. You sacrificed so much, and now your life is simplified. Do you miss your past? Do you already wish to relive your glory days? Alas, I cannot take even an apathetic comfort in this pathetic little triumph.

You want to know the truth about the insides of my eyes? You want to know what gross horrors my "chemically imbalanced" mind projects on their dark screens? Quite frankly, now I'm terrified of the dark. Even just the dark that envelops me when I blink.

When I close my eyes, a black and white movie plays on the interior of my eyelids. It starts at Malfoy Manor, zooming in slowly. It cuts to me as a three year old. And slowly, going through my life day by day, it shows me everything that I've ever done wrong in a silent horror flick. I don't know why it's there. I don't know who put it there. They say my mind does. It's chemically imbalanced, after all.

Yesterday I reached my third year at Hogwarts; after all, even I must sleep sometime. Even if that sleep is never deep, and never nightmareless. And when I try to save myself by blinking, hoping only to catch glimpses of what next has put me on this chopping block, the after image of whatever has condemned me is burned into my vision. It's never gone. But I suppose you wouldn't understand any of this, Potter. I suppose you think that a life of insomnia filled with the guilt of a shameful past is what I deserve.

Someday, Potter, you'll realize that the image of Dumbledore before me, me unable to kill him, will play upon my lids along with every other negative memory I've ever had. I'll blink, and the after image will sit upon whatever surface I happen to be staring at then. An unsuspecting face, a stone wall. Who knows what next will receive the unwanted ministrations of my infinite pain. And it won't matter either.

They want me to take some medicine to make the haze over what I've done well clear. They're right to call it a haze; it's shapeless, shifting, surreal. I doubt it even exists, sometimes, when I'm supposed to be sleeping - when my life-movie is playing. But they're not right to think drugs will clear it. Not right to think they can fix anything, because when I blink I'll see the truth behind my eyelids. It's a cursed truth, but it's there. And drugs will just force it to hide somewhere in the gray matter of my chemically imbalanced brain.

I know you think I deserve this, Potter. And I'm on the verge of agreeing with you, except that I know something that most people don't. Winning the title of Golden Boy, winning the name of the Vanquisher of "He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named," it involved a load of cheating. Lying. Killing. You, of all people, know that I, too, am a person. And you committed real people to unfathomable tortures, pushing the knowledge of your own hypocrisy to the back of your mind in the hopes that it would stay there.

And because of it, there's something both of us share.

So, Potter. Close your eyes. Tell me what you see. And this time, tell me the truth.

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**Hello everyone!!! This is my second HP fic, I think, and I would appreciate all and any reviews. It's post HDH, as should be obvious, and I'm not sure how it turned out. Though it kind of amuses me because you can't really tell it's Malfoy thinking.**

**Oh yeah, and I don't own HP.**


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